Photonic computing startup Arago has raised $26 million in a seed funding round. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate R&D, scale its team across France, Israel, and North America, and deepen strategic business and industrial partnerships to bring its technology to market. Arago’s photonic processor is designed to deliver 10× to 30× reductions in energy consumption while executing high-volume AI tasks with n3 complexity. According to Arago, the processor’s deterministic architecture maximizes memory transfer efficiency and speeds up pointwise operations, achieving optimal performance for tasks with n2 complexity. The processor is reportedly able to utilize a byte of data for thousands of operations to achieve multi-petaOp/s performance. The device is compatible with industry-standard software frameworks and hardware platforms, and the company’s CARLOTA software stack seamlessly interfaces PyTorch and abstracts away low-level hardware details, enabling developers to deploy and scale AI models without modifying their existing codebase. The round was co-led by Earlybird Venture Capital, Protagonist and Visionaries Tomorrow, with participation from GenerativeIQ, C4 Ventures, and Acequia Capital. Additional investments came from former Apple vice president and Fungible co-founder Bertrand Serlet, Arm general manager Christophe Frey, Datadog co-founder Olivier Pomel, and Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, among others.